Gertrude Stein Quotes - Page 3

There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.

Silent gratitude isn't very much to anyone.

Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.

If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.

Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.

The one thing that everybody wants is to be freenot to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free … The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.

This joy you feel is life.

Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.

Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?

The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.

I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.

You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.

I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

Anyone who marries three girls from St Louis hasn't learned much.

Too few is as many as too many.

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

Eating too much meat gives you indigestion and evil thoughts make you eat too much meat.

Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.

The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.

You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.

Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.